Impressionist painter Michelle Nguyen’s recent collection Your Mouth is an Open Wound is the newest exhibit at the Hatch Art Gallery in the new SUB. Nguyen is a student at UBC, and the collection includes several paintings and sketches done in the past year.
The paintings are all done with oil paint on canvases a metre or more in size. Most paintings depict human figures in states of deep emotional thrust combined with images of trees, leaves and shrubs. The colours are extremely vibrant and provide contrast and connection between the humans and their surroundings.
The sketches are all done in black pen on white paper. They illustrate fragile and strange people, faces and bodies that bend the rules of space and expression.
One of the largest paintings, “Apparitions in a crowd,” depicts monsters, humans and demonic figures entangled together in a thick crowd, perhaps expressing the strangeness of being surrounded by people. The painting questions what is real, what we are hiding from those around us, what we are ignoring in those around us, what monsters might be among us and what monsters we ourselves may be. Each figure expresses a unique emotion; additionally, they are drawn in several styles, from hyper-realistic to totally abstract scrawling.
The title piece, “Your Mouth is an Open Wound," portrays a dead person in the arms of an angelic figure. The deceased's mouth is bursting open, perhaps revealing the meaning of the title. In front of the dead person is a live person crouching, looking up at the scene from between thick grass. The piece perhaps is expressing the fragility and risk in human communication, and explores how that metaphor might extend to our human relationship to the natural world.
Your Mouth is an Open Wound will run until October 9. On Thursday October 1, there will be a reception at 7 p.m.